...A Journey “A Journey” is a short story written by Colm Tóibín in 2006. The story follows Mary who picks up her twenty-year-old son David from a hospital. The car ride home is not only a journey in itself but becomes a ride of memories. A ride that through flashbacks shows Mary her journey of life which gets her to start reflecting on the decisions and choices she has made in the past. It is about acceptance. Accepting your life as it is or turned out without looking back and that is the key to start looking forward instead. This story begins in medias res with a flashback. “’Mammy, how do people die?’” (Tóibín, line 1). The flashback is very important since it gives the readers an insight to what has happened in the past and how David’s childhood was like. It also gives the readers the ability to figure out the course of David’s depression which is interesting because his own mother cannot seem to find a reason. She does not want to accept that she might be the reason for his condition and through several flashbacks throughout her journey, she is trying to find another answer. “She tried not to think, tried to keep her mind fixed on the road ahead, but random images of places in the past kept coming to her, and there was nothing she could do to stop them.” (Tóibín, lines 51-53). She puts her focus on old problems she has had in the past, like selling her father’s shop, as if that is going to solve the current problem who is sitting in the backseat of her car. The protagonist...
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...Essay - “A journey” by Colm Tóibín The relationship between parents and their children is very different from one family to another. Many parents are looking gladly forward to having a child, but as soon as they actually get it, many of them becomes scared and ask them self the question, if they are good enough to raise a child. What does it takes to have the energy to take care of your children and still be able to realise yourself. The exact same thing is happening to Mary in this short story by Colm Tóibín. Taking care of others, communication, the past against the present and identity is some of the themes that Colm Tóibín uses in this short-story about a woman called Mary, her husband, Seamus and their child, David. A third person limited narrator tells “A journey”, that starts in medias res and the viewpoint is on Mary. Colm Tóibín uses a technique called Stream of consciousness, where thoughts gets depicted as they arise at Mary and the short-story and becomes one long associated stream of consciousness. We do not get to know where the story takes place, but it might be in a small village, since Seamus is principal for a small country national school. “Their house was just beside the small country national school where Seamus was principal” (p. 2, l. 16-17). Mary is driving on her way home with her son, David, on the backseat. He had been hospitalized because of a depression. Mary is unsure of her self and was afraid of becoming a mom, and after David have...
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...Essay on “A Journey” by Colm Tóibín. 1. Life is a never-ending circle, when someone dies, someone else is born. It is a pattern that we all follow; it is a growth that we all go through. Though the choices we take in life make us individuals, there is a basic growth pattern that we all endure. Being born, growing into a teenager, into an adult, into an elderly, and last we will finally become one with the very earth we came from. The journey of life, from we are born till we die is one of the main themes treated in Colm Tóibíns short-story “A Journey”. The short-story’s protagonist is a married, middle-aged woman named Mary. The story takes place in a car with her and her depressed son, whom she is driving home from the hospital. Before this we are told, in the beginning of the short-story, that David was born nearly after 20 years of marriage between Seamus (Mary’s husband) and herself. David’s first encounter with grave topics such as death was at a young age of merely four. He became the replacement of Mrs Redmond’s (a woman who lived in a nearby cottage) husband, who we are told passed away, just before David was born – this illustrates perfectly my point that when one life pass away another one enters the scene. Mrs Redmond began coming everyday to help Mary, and babysit at night if the she and Seamus were out of town. This is of course is Mrs Redmond’s way to get her mind on something else after the death of her husband, and in that way David becomes a sort of a...
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...A) Analyse and interpret Colm Tóibín’s short story “A Journey” When reaching a blind alley it takes two steps in order to move on. Firstly, one will have to recognize the impermeable obstacle. Secondly one is forced to turn around and light up the path that was previously travelled. In so doing one becomes aware of the mistakes which were made; more importantly, one can navigate around the dead-end and discover a new road. Correspondingly to the above, Colm Tóibín introduces a mom who recalls her past with the intention to mend the broken bonds within her family. The short story starts in medias res and is told by a 1st person narrator, in form of a mother. The reader is thrown directly into a conversation and it is hard to determine time and place. However, we quickly learn that we are in a car with the mother. It is a dark night in March and she is driving home having just summoned her son, David, after his long hospitalization due to his depression. As the title suggests the mother is on a journey. Nonetheless it is not an ordinary journey. The mother travels physically when driving on the road, but the road evokes thoughts about her past, which makes her travel on a metaphysical level as well. She is clearly in a miserable situation – her husband is sick and her son is depressed. The mother avoids referring to her son as a patient suffering from a depression; instead she refers to his illness as suffering from silence, which surfaces in the lines 32-33. This indicates...
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...A: A Journey By Colm Tóibín Growing up is one thing; but growing old and accepting the fact that your life is running out, and you are watching from the sideline, that is another. When you are forced to face the fact that the one you have loved all your life, is about to leave you. Leave you to loneliness, because illness has changed him into a personality that you cannot recognize. A person you cannot find it in you to love no more, then you start looking back at your life. You take a journey into your past, travelling through the memories of your childhood, your marriage, of having children and of losing them to adulthood and you end up comprehending that it is time “to let the grey appear”. (Line 157) This is one of the themes treated in the short story “A Journey” by Colm Tóibín published in 2006. There is used a third person narrator with a restricted point of view, in the short story. The narrator, a woman named Mary, is experiencing a tough time in her life. Her husband lies paralysed in bed, and her only son is suffering from a depression. She feels hurt and lonely, because she cannot reach out to the two people, she loves the most. They have both shut her out in each their way. “Your father will be expecting us (...) He will be lying with his eyes open, she thought, and he’ll barely glance at me when I come in. She smiled at the idea that now she would have two of them for company” (Lines 82-84) She feels like her life is slipping away, like sand through her fingers...
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...Analysis and interpretation of “A journey” ”A journey” is a short-story written by Colm Tóibín in 2006. I will focus on the protagonist, the character Mary, and her reliability by analysing the flashbacks. I will compare the personalities in the two texts “A journey” and “The Story of a Marriage”. The latter written by Andrew Sean Greer, 2008. I will also put the relationship between Mary and David into perspective by comparing “A journey” and the photo Interior with woman and child, Poul Mathey, 1890. The story is written from a 3rd person perspective, though the story is told from the protagonist point of view, as seen by the use of personal pronouns, such as “she” and “he”, but never “I” or “we”. As in “A journey” short-stories are often told from the protagonist point of view. In this case; Mary. She was amused by his earnestness (…). (line 6) The quote is an example that shows the reader that the story is told from Mary's point of view. In the case we are told that She was amused. Nobody would know that expect from herself and the omniscient narrator. Though the narrator is omniscient, it does not tell the reader anything about how, for example, David is thinking. He made it clear in the way he turned that he did not wish to speak to her. (line 69-70) In this case we are only told what she thinks he feels. You can say that it is a partly omniscient narrator. It is a very typical trait for short-stories, that the story is told from one angle only. The reason for...
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...The story “A Journey” by Colm Tóibin deals with a mother’s inner thoughts about her son, whosuffers from depression and her husband who is paralyzed.The main character is called Mary. The story takes place in a car. Only Mary and her twenty yearold son are present. Mary has just picked David up from the hospital and they are headed home. Theatmosphere is very awkward and uncomfortable. David does not want to talk to Mary who isdesperately trying to get him to talk to her (p. 2 line 3 “David had refused to sit in the front seatbeside her and would not talk to her”.) Mary does not remember when David´s illness first startedto show and therefore Mary finds it hard to understand how and why it has happened. She wondersif her and Seamus are to blame for the way David has turned out - (p.2 line 28-30 “(…) her mindbegan to slip back until she found that she was trying once again to pinpoint the day it had started,the day she first noticed that David has grown beyond their reach and become sullen andwithdrawn” … “were they to blame, she and Seamus (…)”. She feels guilty for David’s illness.The story starts off with a flashback were David is about 4 year old. The flashback gives us animpression of David as a child so that we can interpret how seriously his development has been.(P.2 line 20-21“(…) he would smile again and follow her around asking her questions or, when hewas older telling her what had happened to him at school”). Later, as I mentioned before, we aretold that David in the...
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...A journey- Colm Tóibin No one can ever garantee us that our lives will turn out the way WE want it to be. And accepting something that kills us on the inside like sorrow does, is never an easy thing for us to do. Everyone yearns for the perfect future and eventually when/if we approach to what we thought would be perfect but isn’t that perfect at all we start to put questionmarks in our actions. Where did I wrong? How did I end up here? Is it MY fault? Those kinds of question can really take over our minds and leaves us with a feeling hopelessness and guilt. We feel like we have failed big time and we believe that it is our fault if anything in life goes the wrong direction. We’re so good at taking all the blame on our own shoulders and walk on with such a big burden. This is what Mary is going through in the text “ A Journey”. She used to live a normal life back in the days and everything seemed to be perfect for her. But as time passed her by, her life began to turn upside down. Her husband (Seamus) has gone through some strokes and one of those strokes paralyzed his one side and the miserable condition of her son is still a mystery to her as it seems that she can‘t figure out what has caused his depression. Although David has made it clear that he doesn’t want to talk with Mary “No questions, Ma, I said no questions”, Mary still makes an effort to reach through him instead of getting his back against her. During his childhood David was spending most of his time...
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...The Journey The short story ”A Journey” was written by the Irish writer, Colm Tóibín and was published in 2006. By analyzing examples from this text, this essay will first and include a characterization of the narrator Marry; secondly Marry’s relationship towards her son David and their relation to Mrs. Redmond. Thirdly comment on the title of the short story, and finally, a discussion of Andrew Sean Greer’s text “The story of a Marriage” and Paul Mathey’s oil painting will follow. The narrator faces several problems of life, such as her relationship to her son David, and the guilt she feel towards him. The narrator is a woman called Marry who is married to a man called Seamus, and they have a son called David. Marry and Seamus has been married for twenty years and after twenty years of marriage without children, they finally became blessed with a son called David. Or did they really become blessed? The story takes place in the narrator’s car, which is on her way back home with her clinically depressed son. The plot has several flashbacks from Marry’s life, especially memories about her son David, her husband Seamus and her father. One of the first flashbacks that appear is a flashback about her son David, “They were used to being free. Yet David did not really make the great change in their lives that she expected” (page 1, lines 13-14), this indicates that Mary and Seamus was not bonded with their son from the start, they were not ready having a child, although...
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...A Journey The short story A Journey is written by Colm Tòibin. The short story is about life and death and it shows that life is a never-ending circle, everytime someone dies, someone else is born. Life is unpredictable, and you have to accept the changes that might appear We have to fight for our goals and this short story clearly shows the bright and dark side of life. The short story starts in medias res, and presents the first flashback (page 1, line 1-21), which takes us back to David’s childhood when he was four years old. She remembers him, as a happy child who followed her around and asked her questions about everything. For instance, he asked her how people die in which she answered, that God would take one’s soul out of love and that everybody would die someday – not very appropriate to tell a four year old. Even though his seriousness Mary had a hard time not to show her amusement of his inquisitiveness. The first flashback shows David’s inquisitiveness and his mother’s amusement. It’s written in third person and is subjective and from the narrator’s ankle and mind. (Page 1 line 12), “She felt that perhaps they would be too old and set in their ways to bring up a child”. The journey takes place in a car, in which we meet the two main characters Mary and David. Mary is the main character and she is David’s mom. It can be assumed that she is quite old as we are told that she had him after almost twenty years of marriage and actually had given up hope of ever having...
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...A Journey A Journey is a story written by Colm Tóibín in 2006. The story is about Mary, her family and their problems. In this essay I will find out what could cause the problems. To support my claims I will make an analysis and interpret the short story “A journey” in which I will put my interpretation into perspective with this to other items. The story starts in media res where we get introduced to Mary the protagonist, and her son David. At the beginning of the story there is a flashback. The flashback is from David’s childhood. Suddenly the story moves on to present time, where Mary picks her son up from the hospital and drives him home. Almost the whole story takes place in the car. Mary is an ordinary married woman and it seems like she has an unhappy and depressed family. She lives with her husband Seamus and her son David, in the house her father gave her at her weeding. David is suffering from a depression and Mary does not know why, neither can she figure it out. Mary seems to be a good and careful mother “She dreamed for a second that they had not sold it and thought that working there every day might help David” Even though if it seems like Mary has been a good mother, she still has not spend a enough of her time with David when he was child. “Mrs. Redmond, who lives in a nearby cottage and whose husband died just after David was born, came in every day to help and babysat at night if they wanted to get out” This might indicate that it was not Mary...
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...A Journey Colm Tóibín, born in 195, is an Irish novelist from Wexford and A Journey is a short story written in 2006. Sometimes life is all abort accepting how our lives have turned out. Life makes us wonder whether we have made the right decisions or not and all the decisions makes us only stronger as a person. The main character, Mary, experiences in the short story how hard and surprising life can be. Mary is a wife and a mother, and her husband, Seamus, whose half of his body is paralyzed as a consequence of a stroke. Their marriage seems to have gone well even though her son suffers from a depression. In the beginning being we introduced to David and his mother, Mary. This is a flashback from the main character, where the four years old son is asking her mother a lot of questions as: "Mammy, how do people die?" (P 5, L 1). Mary is amused by his earnestness, but tries to treat him seriously and answer so well as she can. Thereafter the story flash-forwards about sixteen years into the future where Mary is driving home from the hospital with her son in the back seat. In the car she thinks about how her life has turned out to be. David says to his mother, while they are in the car, not to ask him any questions. Throughout the entire car-journey David lights one cigarette after the other and keeps silent most of the time: "I don't know. Just don't ask me anything, is that agreed? Just don't ask me anything." (P 3, L 73) and “ (..) He sat in the back of the car and lit...
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...”A Journey” is a short story by Colm Tóibín. It’s written in 2006. The plot is told by a 3rd person omniscient narrator. The composition of the short story is in chronological order with flashbacks. The story begins in a flashback where we are introduced to David’s fear of presence. David is an unsteady boy who is afraid of life. To overcome his fear he keeps asking questions about life and people’s presence in the world. The oil painting, Interior with Woman and Child, on picture 1 by Paul Mathey from 1890 could be an illustration of David – a sad, alone boy who don’t feel secure. Who just stands waiting for the next thing to happen? Mrs. Redmond is taking care of him. David feels safe when he is near her: “Often, when Mary went down to the cottage to collect him, he did not want to come home. But then, once he was back in his own house, he would start to smile again and follow her around asking her questions or, when he was older, telling her what had happened to him at school”[1]. You can tell that he is secure when he is with Mrs. Redmond because he likes staying with her. You can also tell from the quotation above that he looks up to her mother and thinks that she has a large knowledge. He is embarrassed of his stay at the hospital. He can’t look her mother in her eyes afterwards: “… and for a quick second she caught his eye. He looked away”. David’s mother, Mary, has thick blonde hair and a large-boned face. She wants the...
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...A journey A “Mammy, how do people die?”. This very first sentence in the story is rather essential of the theme and interpretation of the novel. Not only does the question itself referee to depression and disillusionment but it also tells us about David and his way of thinking about life in general. The story starts in media res with a flashback followed by the actual situation with Mary driving her son home from the hospital after it seems as if he has had a minor depression. “The doctors called it depression”. David doesn’t want to talk with his mom in defiance to his Childhood, which we get to know as a time where David was chat-fully inclined. However, the relationship between Mary and David seems very tight and the fact that he sits in the backseat of the car instead of beside her just supports this statement. This could be due to the lack of presence from the parents side. In one of the many flashbacks we get to know of Davids childhood, which beard the stamp of the babysitter mrs. Redmond. David got a very special relationship with this woman and reckoned her as a second mother. It seems as if David reluctantly accepts the changing environments. The fact that David is constantly following his mother around and asking her questions points to a much more serious problem here. When David asks a lot of questions it's clearly an attempt to associate with his parents. Mary doesn't seem to understand this, as she just answers the questions randomly without thinking...
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...lives we will all inevitably face challenges. Life can deal us devastating blows and force us to make seemingly impossible decisions and choices. At times the power of these existential blows can be so strong that it forces us to our knees, disabling us of doing what is most fundamental in life: living. This condition is considered a depression: a complete lack of joy, motivation, energy and vigor. This is the main theme in Colm Tóibín’s short story “A Journey” from 2006. The protagonist, Mary, has suffered more than most from the blows of life. She has a paralyzed husband, a clinically depressed son and both of her parents have passed away at a relatively young age. The actual story takes place at night in Mary’s car. She has just picked up David, her depressed son, from the hospital and they are on their way home. During the ride Mary reminisces about her past life; the things that she has been through and what she could have done differently. The story is written minimalistically without a narrator to explain why certain things occur. Instead Tóibín uses a 3rd person limited narrator that tells the story from Mary’s point of view. The reader observes Mary’s thoughts and “sees” the world from her eyes thus making the story very subjective. Mary is particularly concerned with her son’s disease and she wonders if she and her husband could have done anything differently to avoid the situation. She regrets the fact that she sold her father’s old shop because had she kept it,...
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